April 2010

April 23, 2010 -
Helen Brown —
Anyone who is the least bit interested in New Testament texts and translations will know how confusing the subject can be. Why are some sections omitted from certain translations? Why are some verses so different? The Hebrew Bible doesn't have nearly so many of these issues, since before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls we didn't have early manuscripts, only copies based on a much later codified text. But for the New Testament we have hundreds of early manuscripts and fragments, replete with spelling variations, marginal notes, omissions ...

April 23, 2010 -
David Lang —
Yesterday I showed how you can search by root to find related words in Greek and Hebrew. In response to that post, someone asked if there is an easy way to identify the root of a given word. Indeed there is! Suppose I'm looking at Genesis 1:1 in Hebrew and I want to know the root of the Hebrew word ‏ראשׁית ("beginning"). If I position my cursor over that word, the following information will appear in the Instant Details box: Note the word ‏ראשׁ appearing in parentheses to the right of the lexical form. That's the root of ‏ראשׁית. Now suppose I ...

April 22, 2010 -
David Lang —
In my previous post I talked about how to identify places where a search term is not found. For example, the Greek verb αγαπαω is surprisingly not used in books such as Acts and Philemon. This prompted me to ask why the concept of "love" would not be mentioned in an account of the early church or an appeal to a slave owner to show kindness to his runaway slave. Of course, the fact that the verb translated "love" does not appear in those books does not actually mean that the concept of "love" is really absent. After all, it may be the case t ...

April 21, 2010 -
David Lang —
Accordance makes it easy to find where words appear, but sometimes it's more interesting to see where a word does not appear. Someone on our forums recently asked how to do just that: While studying yesterday I discovered that the word "mercy" is not mentioned in the book of Revelation. This piqued my interest to see what other books that mercy is not mentioned in. He got several answers, all of which revolved around doing a simple search for "mercy." Since Accordance defaults to showing only those verses which contain your search hits, one ...

April 16, 2010 -
David Lang —
Last night on our forums, someone posted the following question: There is a portion of scripture that mentions "understanding", in some form, at least four times in 10 verses. I know that I could simply enter "understand*" and look through the results. But I was wondering if there was a search argument that would give me better results. Any tips? This search is a great example of what can be done using the Construct window. This user did not mention what translation he was using, but I figured a more formal translation like the ESV would be ...

April 14, 2010 -
David Lang —
When Accordance Bible Software was released in 1994, it was not the first computer program to search grammatically-tagged Greek and Hebrew texts. There had been programs for mainframes and DOS well before Accordance 1.0, but the scholars who used those programs had to be part scholar and part computer geek. Accordance was revolutionary because it made all those powerful grammatical searches accessible to people with no background or interest in computer science. From the very beginning, we've done our best to avoid the technical jargon of ...

April 08, 2010 -
Rick Bennett —
In my last post I responded to a question on Twitter with a how-to on searching for frequently occurring words in a particular passage. A couple days ago I received another question on Twitter, this time asking how to create flashcards from Accordance search results. To answer this I created a screencast showing how you can export search results from Accordance to Flashcardexchange.com (FCE) and Mental Case for iPhone. With FCE you can setup a free account and quiz yourself from any web browser (including compatible mobile phones). Mental C ...

April 07, 2010 -
David Lang —
I'm sorry for the lack of blogging lately. We've got several projects in the pipeline and that's leaving us little time to blog. So I'll be filling in with a few older blog posts which are now buried in the archives yet still worth a read. This post was originally published April 4, 2006. At the recent training seminars, I told the attendees that there was one keyboard shortcut which they absolutely had to learn. By the end of the day, I had repeated it so much that I doubt any of them will ever forget it. Learn this one key-combination, and ...

April 02, 2010 -
Rick Bennett —
Today on Twitter a friend of mine from seminary posted this question: "can I get a list of frequent words from a passage of scripture?" The question was for a particular class where the professor assigns different biblical passages for which the student must apply his hermeneutical method. I tried a couple quick searches for this in Genesis 22, and then posted a screen shot with my preliminary results. Since the screen shot needed a bit of explanation, I thought I would write a blog post to describe what I did. In this example in the BHS text ...

April 01, 2010 -
David Lang —
It's April Fool's Day, and I was tempted to write a post announcing that OakTree Software and Olive Tree Bible Software were merging to form a company called Deciduous Bible Software. But then I realized that everything lives forever on the internet, and I didn't want our friends at Olive Tree continually having to answer questions about the "failed merger." Hopefully my plan B will be just as fun without being nearly as prone to unintended consequences! In yesterday's post, I told you about an Accordance Training Seminar I taught in ...